WASHINGTON – Barack Obama said his sharp-tongued wife, Michelle, was not aiming at Hillary Clinton when she recently declared, “If you can’t run your own house, you can’t run the White House.”

Obama’s wife started including the line in her stump speech last week when she said it at a Chicago women’s event.

“No, she wasn’t making any reference to that,” Barack Obama told reporters yesterday when questioned about whether it was aimed at Clinton.

He said her line was about “making sure that we are talking the talk but also walking the walk” about family values. “That’s all it was referring to.”

In Michelle Obama’s remarks in Council Bluffs Iowa, the Chicago-born lawyer talks about how she and her husband decided to “put our children first” and “model what it means to have family values in this country.”

“Our view is that if you can’t run your own house, you certainly can’t run the White House. So we’ve adjusted our schedule to make sure that our girls are first,” she said.